Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced that Instagram will be introducing “Private Story Likes” for Stories. The feature will let users like people’s stories without sending them DMs—which might clog their DM section.
Currently, you’re not really able to send a casual ‘like’ reaction to people’s stories like how you would for regular Instagram posts. Instead, you’re able to send them ‘reactions‘ based on popular emojis—including the cry-laughing emoji, the 100 emoji, the sad emoji, and the heart eye emoji amongst others. Each reaction, although already pretty casual in itself, would still be known as a DM (direct message) on Instagram. This will mean that your DM section could be filled with just reaction notifications instead of having them be filled with typed responses.
“So now, as you go through Stories, between send message and that little paper airplane, there will be a heart icon. And if you tap on it, it’ll send the author of that story a like, and that like will show up in the viewer sheet, not in your DM thread with them,” said Mosseri.
Mosseri’s video showed what it looked like when you like another user’s Story. But it doesn’t really explain what it would look like when your own Stories get likes. However, we know what while you won’t see a public count of the likes, you can see who left a like on your Stories when you look at a Story’s “view sheet”.
“The idea here is to make sure that people can express more support for each other, but also clean up DMs a little bit,” said Mosseri.
I’m quite curious to see the feature rolled out… as it currently is being rolled out. Story reactions do clutter up my DM sections on Instagram, but those with a professional Instagram account say that it doesn’t really affect them as much. If the ‘likes’ feature doesn’t work, I’d like to request a separate section for DM reactions and types DMs—or at least a filter.
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